IdleStacks

Glad to see the server isn't even up yet and we already have people who take their faction membership too seriously talking down to people on the forums for having different opinions

See this is the big problem with VOIP. We don't get to see concrete examples because half the roleplay is hidden to the party that isn't in the PD. How's anyone but the people currently inside the TS channel going to know if the officer was powergaming by speaking while shooting or pulling sick ass maneuvers with the PD cruiser? And in most cases, how is anyone but the officer himself going to know if he powergamed? Allowing use of VOIP essentially creates an unpunishable rulebreak unless whoever did it is stupid enough to record it and post a video of it. Not that I'm sure typing everything out would be very viable. And in any case I'm hoping the GTA V being huge will help with this as officers take longer to reach scenes, ending the problem of people being doomed to lose if they take more than 10 seconds to shoot down an officer and gtfo. I hope so too because without the PD we may as well be playing a more boring version of team death match. I hope my posts aren't misconstrued as blind hatred of the faction because both sides have to co-exist on the server and be relatively balanced or else there's no point to playing the game. I'm not sure when this change happened but I spent the last year and a half or so (2016 to 2017 maybe?) roleplaying in the DOC and I think I still caught them while I was RPing in a gang, or at least there'd been movements towards punishing people who went to the M4 as a first resort already.

Kind of funny that all posts with criticism regarding use of VOIP, PD powergaming and metagaming were met with a dogpiling of "that doesn't happen anymore" and then I go do a cursory search through Youtube that immediately tells me that no, VOIP use isn't heavily moderated, and no, care isn't taken to actually act like it's an IC radio. Most videos, wisely, drown out Teamspeak by use of terrible music so people outside the faction don't really get to see much of it. Keep in mind that I'm taking no side in this argument because I'm not sure if typing everything out is viable, but don't try to pretend like it's a flawless mechanic that's 100% fair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uC2sMqHFtA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiK8503EI6Y These were just the two most recent (and frankly, embarassing) examples from around a year ago, probably just before server shut down? I haven't been on LSRP for years and it doesn't seem like much changed regarding police, this entire thread has just been people giving their opinions and suggestions and PD reps replying that, actually, PD is the perfect faction and everything is already being done as well as it possibly could. Very low expectations for any not-forced improvement from this faction come server release from what this thread showed me, hopefully they're proven wrong. I'd just be happy if some officers tried having a personality this time around so interactions with the police don't boil down to one of the parties typing out a bunch of canned lines and commands and then driving to jail. If I had to guess, it'll be more or less the same as LSRP where the average cop may as well be an NPC for all the RP you're going to squeeze out of him (not that the average gangbanger is much better) and detectives and the GND are the only people worth even trying to interact with.

I suggest an application process should be devised and made available for people who wish to roleplay as arms dealers, be they roleplaying with factions or not. This application process should determine a couple of things. where the guns are coming from, who, if anyone, is getting the guns for the player, what the player is planning to do with the weapons, what's the long term goal for the character (kind of breaking the OOC/IC divide here, unfortunately) and the player should be making clear any and all OOC/IC affiliations they have with any factions, all this relatively long application should serve to dissuade and weed out people who would just be going "/me would get the guns from Texas" and merrily skipping off to sell guns to their OOC friends. The ultimate objective of this application system is to make sure that there is a realistic weapon-to-end-user pipeline. * The official faction monopoly on firearms is broken, this would made guns resemble more a commodity like any other that is subject to supply and demand, and since more supply would be introduced in the form of these unofficial arms dealers, it would help keep guns at a stable, realistic and attainable price, staving off inflation for a longer time, and diminishing its effects when it inevitably happens. * More supply of firearms in the hands of smaller dealers means that gangbangers are no longer forced to totally-not-metagame the name of some important Italian or Russian and try to get in good with them - it gives street gangs, stick up crews and other similar factions street-level weapons dealers that they can realistically gel with well enough. * Factions without OOC connections and copious amounts of money aren't hopeless anymore, since these street level dealers are supposedly far more accessible in terms of where they're situated in the criminal totem-pole. * Players who are not affiliated with any official criminal factions now have the slim possibility of roleplaying an arms dealer, opening up new avenues of roleplay. * A handful of official factions are no longer the ultimate arbiters of who gets to engage in criminal roleplay. Let's be real here, without weapons, a TON of avenues of RP are closed off to factions, no robberies, no faction attacks, no self-defence, no gun re-selling. The former system is good, but it places a ridiculous amount of trust and power into the hands of very few people. * Gives the factions team (?) more avenues through which to control the supply of guns into the server. If whoever deals with this thinks there's too few guns in the server and is already handing out as many weapons as he's comfortable with to all the official factions, then applications can simply be opened and new weapons dealers made. And as always, if there's too many guns, you can always just lower the amount you give out. However there are some cons as well. * You risk flooding the server with dirt cheap, disposable weapons, which could lead to an increase in people shooting each other over minor perceived slights, deathmatching, aggression baiting police, etc etc. Nothing new, but always worth thinking about. * More work for the various teams as the supply of firearms has to be fine-tuned to keep the server well-supplied, but not bursting. * Whichever team is tasked with dealing with these applications (faction team? mods? testers?) will be opened up to criticism, unwarranted or not, and community scrutiny regarding which applications they're accepting and denying. * Slightly lowers the prestige of being an official faction. * More OOC systems in place, more opportunities for meta gaming and favoritism. In my opinion the pros far, far outweigh the cons. This also gives the PD the opportunity of minor investigations on individual weapons dealers to take down. Being accepted into this weapon dealer program should come with the stipulation that the PD is given permission to take you down permanently if they manage to build a case against you, encouraging good criminal roleplay and regularly weeding out characters too stupid or short sighted to last long , as well as giving the investigation arms of the police something to do other than build cases against official factions. I could stay here and wax poetic about all the incredible RP opportunities this would bring to both sides but I'm going to leave it here since this is already a really long winded post.

Really like this idea. I always though GTAO's character creation was absolute trash (though I think we'll be getting something slightly more customizable iirc? I haven't played GTAO in years) even in 2013 so this would be a nice way to circumvent it if someone can't get anything that resembles a human. Not to mention that of course, R* didn't really care to add proper body sliders so everyone is basically a carbon copy of eachother.

You got me with the Pisswasser lol, I forgot how overt they got with some shit in the later entries. I've seen some of the fake companies that management made up in the previews and honestly I really like them and feel like they could have come straight out of the main game. I do think the fake teams should remain, but I wouldn't be against adding a couple of real-life team hats in principle. Kitting yourself out in full Bulls gear or whatever would be a bit too much for me though, that would just remind me of the HQ skin Chiraq era on SAMP and probably give me nightmares.

Well, going by points; 1) I don't think having an OOC server for people to chat in is a good idea in any way shape or form, to me, it's just retarded drama waiting to happen for whatever reasons and in any case, it's good practice to keep roleplay on the server as much as humanly possible. Like I said, the IC social media clone could be more than enough if it's any good, at least then we can keep the e-banging to the server itself. 2) In principle I agree with the concept of CK applications, but it's also something that I feel has to be treated with a LOT of seriousness and only be doled out to the most cockroach-like characters who constantly pull/try to pull ridiculous shit and often end up dying for it. What happened in-character to lead to the future murder should be documented extensively through screenshots (videos, if possible) and whoever would handle applications should check for the quality of RP to make sure someone isn't going to get CK'ed for a reason that just isn't worth deleting someone's character over. TLDR: could work, but it'd be tough to handle properly I think. 3) Like I said, I think modernising would wipe out too many avenues of criminal roleplay and probably heavily complicate a lot of the RP that's easily accessible to people (like selling drugs). I can't really find a good angle for this.

OP has a really good point, and it's something I've been thinking about for a while now. But I haven't been able to come up with any decent solution. The fact is, GTA V's map is fucking massive compared to SA's. SA had 3 cities and it STILL wasn't nearly as big, and we all know how active SF and LV were. I think this is an issue that the community is going to just have to be mindful about, try to keep ourselves concentrated in LS only, at the very least. I'm sad to say but GTA V's country side is fucking garbage compared even to SA's, while still being ridiculously huge and far away. I fear that it's mostly going to be Tierra Robada-like, an absolute ghost town that has no purpose other than set dressing for people to drive through and the very occasional faction that tries to set up shop there (and inevitably fails because nobody but faction members ever shows up). If we're lucky maybe the country side can become a popular destination to lose the cops, but I'm not hopeful about even that since it takes enough time to get there that you'd end up with 10 different tails anyway. On server release I'd definitely not bother with anything but LS. Let the server develop a bit before splitting up the population. But really, it's a super-complicated issue and one that has no good solution, the map is, quite simply, way too big to properly accommodate roleplay between even a thousand people. Other than some mapping magic to scale the map down a bit (would this be possible, or even desirable, really?), I just don't know.

There could be no worse thing than bringing roleplay to OOC means. People already found retarded ways to beef in LSRP back when everyone used their own Teamspeak, let alone having everyone in a single chat getting mad at eachother because X crew hit up Z crew unprovoked or Y crew keeps provoking X crew for no reason. Keep roleplay in the server as much as possible. A Facebook rippoff for our social media needs should eventually be implemented, like you said, e-banging has reached stratospheric levels in the last half a dozen years and no "realistic" depiction of gangs can be complete without the internet gangsters these days. But sharing IC shit in OOC channels is just a recipe for disaster in a million different ways. One of which is... no offense but I don't want to see people with stupid ass profile pictures like mine post IC shit acting like they're gangbangers, it's immersion breaking (and funny) to say the least. I'm of the opinion that Faction Management should force CK wars on factions who have been beefing violently, consistently, for ridiculously long periods of time. I've been in protracted PK wars and they really just aren't fun, eventually. You're logging on every day and you know some car filled with 4 guys armed with automatics is going to show up and shit on you eventually, and the same thing goes on for some times WEEKS, with the attacker and attacked alternating between eachother. This would deter people from constantly mass murdering eachother's blocks as the looming sword of a forced CK war (and actual consequences, imagine that) hangs over them. This would also guarantee that only smarter and less violent factions stay around for long. And no, I don't believe a mutual CK war agreement is enough. A bigger, more well connected faction has no reason to ever accept a CK war if they're smart at all because they will eventually win by attrition. More soldiers, more guns, more patience means a smaller faction is fucked because their attacks have less impact,or fail, or they just can't afford guns every day to retaliate. I don't agree. You have to think on this; crime is, increasingly, harder to commit, as avenues of making money through illicit means either get more esoteric or disappear completely, or the police crack down on them. As these activities become more esoteric, it also gets way, way harder to properly simulate them in a game that wasn't made with simulating them in mind; how do you simulate one of the most common criminal activities today, for example, card skimming and other credit-card related scams? You can't. The game isn't equipped for it and trying to program such a thing, make it useful and balance it in how hard it is to do and how much money it gives is a herculean task. We have to make some concessions to modern-day realism like keeping weed illegal so that illegal roleplayers can actually have easy avenues of making money, or else you end up with a situation where RPing a criminal is a chore where you're making 20 bucks per day selling crack to the one guy on the server bothering to roleplay a crackhead. At the end of the day, it's a game and one not meant to simulate Los Angeles, but meant to simulate Los Santos. Los Santos has its own culture, its own history, its own people, its own laws and its own everything. It's why I always found it really stupid that people got mad when others roleplayed factions that "realistically" don't really have a presence in real life LA - LS is LS exactly for that, to give us MORE roleplay freedom so that we can have more fun and more variety, and bend the rules of real life whenever need be so that we can make it at least mildly fun to play. On the topic of real-life brands in clothing; I'm of the opinion that they shouldn't be around. Management should really just make up their own brands - give the server its own culture, don't just jack shit from real life and have it interacting with shirts from fake teams and fake places. I know a lot of them are sexual innuendo and other such jokes, but it's more than possible to roleplay around these anyway, just ignore the fact that it was originally meant as a joke. Not to mention that making money off LSRP and having real-life brands in it opens it up to litigation if it eventually gets big enough to warrant it. And on a smaller, more personal note, I always thought it looked fucking retarded to have real-life brands in GTA games, cars, stores, fast food places, etc etc, it just doesn't fit the GTA game vibe.

I can't look at this as a negative against the idea, honestly. If you're rich enough to have several vehicles and you use them enough that they require maintenance often, then well, that's good. It's a money sink and a good way to re-distribute cash. If you want the convenience of owning and using several vehicles, then you should have to suffer the side-effects of such a thing. But then again the more I think about it the more RP opportunities pop up: if you're truly too busy to go get your own car fixed... why not hire an assistant to do it (I mention this to you specifically because if I remember correctly, you mostly roleplayed characters who would, realistically, be able to have such luxuries)? In fact, if you're rich and influential enough, why the hell not have your own driver - who would be taking care of such minutiae of every day life while you got on with your own roleplay? Spread your wealth - and ease your burden, more roleplay for you, the mechanic, and whoever you want to hire, and as a bonus, money trickles down from the more fortunate to the less in a natural way. This IS a good point. We'd have to do something which I am very much not fond of in multiplayer games - trusting that supply and demand even out. This very rarely works (barely works in real life anyway) because well, it's a game and not real life. People get bored, people troll, people intentionally spite one another even if they could make more working together. It's a complicated issue and in my mind the one pure negative this idea may bring. However this could maybe be alleviated by: Minimum service should always be guaranteed by the server. Pay-N-Spray should remain as a "bare minimum" mechanic - something that allows you to fix all visual damage (I'm not fond of the idea of every second car looking like a junker because no mechanics have logged on recently) and keep your car rolling, albeit at minimum condition, and soon requiring another visit if you drive recklessly. At the end of the day it's a game, and we have to have concessions or soon enough everyone will be riding bycicles instead (should these be influenced by the same mechanics, by the way?) In my opinion this is one of the positives. It gives taxi drivers, personal drivers and bus drivers more reason to exist and facilitates roleplay between possibly hundreds of people. Plus, you can always have a friend take you. On the topic of how often maintenance should be required, I do believe it should be common enough to warrant thought, but not common enough that it'd get annoying (revolutionary thought, I know). Make it take months and nobody is going to bother roleplaying a mechanic so they can do an oil change once a day, if they're lucky, for someone who will probably drive in and GTFO ASAP. I wonder if it would be possible to tie a vehicle's state to kilometers or time driven something like 15 hours driven - or something like 3000 kilometers? From what I can find online, GTA V's map is around 8km by 10km, which should hold up for around 300 turns around the map? It'd certainly take some fine tuning and I'd expect it to take a couple of months or more to reach a state where it satisfies most players in how long it takes for a vehicle to deteriorate but I definitely think it would be worth the effort. God knows LSRP needed money sinks and trickle-down mechanics (never thought I'd say that, lol). If all else fails, encouraging mechanic roleplay as a tip for new players could help keep mechanic shops populated - and set players up for success in finding avenues of RP. Sorry for the ridiculously long-winded post, but things like these deserve a lot of thought because one mechanic can easily influence a hundred others and server balance is a precarious thing, that must be kept from the start, or it will never be there at all.

I have a hard time believing custom mapping would be 100% necessary right off the bat and I think it'd be a good idea to avoid server bloat and poor performance/sync issues as long as it's possible. Projects overcrowded with factions? Join an existing one or roleplay as something else.

I actually like this idea, I think it could also create great synergy between a bunch of professions, as taxi drivers and truckers depend on mechanics to keep their own RP going. However, screw having your controls changed around, that's NEVER fun, in any game. I'm thinking more like decreased top speed and worsening of the car's handling (however, like you, I'm not sure if it's possible to alter the car's handling values "on the fly", so to speak).

Forced CKs is a very simple topic to handle: they should be the result of a faction CK war initiated by mutual agreement by the leaders of the warring factions in cases where regular faction wars have been going on for far too long. If one of the leaders refuses to initiate a CK war despite this, faction management should be entitled to and tasked with determining if a CK war is proper (at request of one of the leaders), necessary and feasible (no CK wars where it's a 1-5 people faction against some 30+ member behemoth unless agreed upon mutually, for example). This should be a relatively important occasion for the server and not something that happens constantly - people get attached to characters, and killing them off constantly isn't fun. In the topic of lengthier prison sentences I will say this as someone who was a member of the DoC in SAMP for a year and a half or more some years ago - no. The LSRP limit was fine. It was good punishment for committing crimes and getting caught, but not so punitive that actually serving the sentence would be a daunting task. We have to understand that this is, above all, a game, and one focused around crime at that. People (and especially newbies) will be immediately drawn to it and it's the type of RP that will be the norm, most likely. Making people serve 5 hour sentences for jaywalking won't make for good or engaging roleplay and the majority of people who get arrested, even good roleplayers (themselves rare) have very little interest in roleplaying in prison. I expect the facilities will be more or less like SAMP - the fighting will be constant to stave off boredom and the roleplay will vary from people trolling to pass the time, to serious factions and roleplayers every now and then (remember that these factions were rare even in SAMP and when they were around all the members had alts because prison roleplay gets old fast, they would login maybe for an hour or two a day, the place would be a desert of roleplay most other times, even the COs spent most of their time alt tabbed). Sentences should also not be allowed to be served offline - this can only lead to people simply not bothering to ever roleplay in prison or even be present (which in itself is already 50% of roleplaying).

This. It should be as the countryside, LV and SF were in LS:RP - according to convenience and what the people involved in the roleplay find it appropriate to be. If at all possible, avoid talking about it at all.

The chance to actually have some balance. When I stopped playing LS:RP in 2017~ it was partly because the economy was so far gone. Unless you were willing to spend your days fishing for a pittance, got lucky enough to have OOC friends with money (or met someone who tipped you 100k for driving him in a cab, which to be fair, since the economy was so broken was actually relatively common), or waited a ton of actual months with money in your savings, you were doomed to be poor and therefore unable to interact with a bunch of aspects of roleplaying a criminal. This was further compounded by the fact that making money as a criminal was basically impossible unless you were selling guns since 1) drugs were useless and common and no one wanted them for anything other than roleplay, rarely 2) there were no scripted jobs with payment other than a terrible car chopping script 3) a desert eagle was around 20,000 by the time I left, and an AK 50,000, in a game where some people made it a point to go around shooting everyone under really thinly veiled excuses, so you were always at a big risk of losing said sizable investment Plus there's a ton of other reasons, and as far as I know, this could have all been fixed in the 4 years I wasn't there to see it. I hope these issues are taken seriously because they aren't easy fixes at all and while the new engine and scripting possibilities are great, GTA V will also undoubtedly be harder to balance in certain ways.